Wade Guyton OS at the Whitney Museum of Art, October 4, 2012-January 13, 2013

   Wade Guyton's mid- career survey fits well within the precincts of the post 1945 American modernist art territory staked out by the Whitney. The work displayed on the museum's third floor includes painting, sculpture and collage and if one ran through and peripherally scanned the ensemble it might well serve as a survey of  "triumphant" American art ranging chronologically from Barnett Newman to Post- Painterly Abstraction to Minimalism. Newman's Stations of the Cross cycle immediately comes to mind in one of Guyton's large series of black, inkjet- printed, stretched-linen panels. The machinic rhetoric of the screen grab, scanner and ink jet printer displaces the humane existential stance of Newman's work. A man's extensivity gets exchanged for his extensions.  Rather than Newman's incrementally painted swaths of stubborn sublimity, Guyton skims his surfaces with incidents of juddering printer glitches and unevenly dried- up ink matrices. This attention to machine-made accident is reminiscent of Warhol's squeegee scrapes and his serial, visual stutter. When a repetitive trope jumps in fits and starts like this, it usually signifies a certain antipathy to a faithful reproduction of the original. In Warhol it can also signify a brut disinterest to proprietary beauty. The different signification and purpose of mechanical chance in Guyton's work is interesting when compared to his predecessors. His use of accident seems more restrained and tasteful. His is a more epicurean style based upon  a la carte ordering from a variety of influences.

   The few early works displayed here stress a materialist phenomenology and seem intended to serve as counterpoint to the literal and figurative fracture of mechanical reproduction dominating the show. A pile of found plywood, inverted by the artist, occupies a wall in a shallow planar display of "the real" recuperated within a formalist aesthetic. A similar later work has an ink-jet printed two- by- four incidentally leaning in a corner. These disparate works offer a meager scrim through which to discern a development of the artist's sensibilities. The inclusion of these primary forms invokes a pre -mediated world from which the artist sprung, a rustic alchemist, ready to turn real plywood into virtual picture planes. Guyton's advance press notices of traveling from the rural South to the big city to make his indelible mark may resonate with art historical genealogies in artists like Rauschenberg and Noland (both of whose work he liberally channels) but here that narrative seems much less cogent both historically and formally. A mid- career survey of an artist's work, even more than a retrospective  (which might be forgiven the sin of tendentious historicizing), shouldn't be so transparent in attempting to delineate a historical provenance for a younger artist. Unfortunately this is a lurking problem in the rest of the show. Even more disappointing is the fact that the problem extends into the core of Guyton's own aesthetic. He self- historicizes in a way that undercuts an innovative approach to process.

   I was primed to like this show. Guyton's work contains many of the formal elements that I enjoy in a peculiarly American visual rhetoric from Stuart Davis to Christopher Wool. These include slab- like lateral color, generic quotidian fragments, ridiculous scale, open- ended rhythmic composition, parallax optics, sloppy paint application, etc. The problem I had with achieving a fresh view of Guyton's work was that the clear influences of Davis, Noland, Kelly, Martin, Stella, Warhol, were never fully synthesized into a newer aesthetic that might define the artist as a "strong poet " in the present. In the "Anxiety of Influence" Harold Bloom writes " The later poet, in his own final phase, already burdened by an imaginative solitude that is almost a solipsism, holds his own poem so open to the precursors work that at first we might believe that the wheel has come full circle."  A strong reader of one's artistic influences can summon the power to erase the traces of their own borrowing by making their lenders go begging for attention themselves. Schwitters may have influenced Rauschenberg but one doesn't readily think of him when experiencing Factum 1 and 2.  Kandinsky might have had some early influence on Noland but it doesn't come immediately to mind when looking at one of Noland's chevron paintings. A sense of inevitability in a contemporary work may be dependent upon its predecessors' historical influence but this should not be foregrounded in such a way to eclipse the joy of rediscovery in the fresher view. There is something too seamless (ironic, given all the literal disjuncture) about Guyton's aesthetic provenance, both tactically and aesthetically. One can't help but make the references to Agnes Martin in one work or Ellsworth Kelly in another. The work never fully breaks free from a dogmatic adherence to a received American art history, one ostensibly processed by an individual, yet seemingly administered by a committee. Guyton himself seems to intuit a need for a different cultural perspective by the inclusion of Joseph Beuys and Martin Kippenberger into his mix of influences. Beuys seems to percolate in Guyton's absurdly oversized vitrines with scattered, printed and manipulated reproductions and Kippenberger's ghost arises in idiosyncratically manipulated modernist furniture sculptures and installations. Unfortunately these late interventions fail to counteract the dominance of influences in this show and rather than offering a foil, they act as a depressing reminder of the power of contemporary culture for superficial assimilation. If the meta-narrative of superficial assimilation was one that was embraced in Guyton's work this tactic might play out in an interesting critical way, but the sincerity with which the artist pays homage to his predecessors' forms tends to deny this critical distance.

Wade Guyton Untitled, 2007 Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen, 84 x 69 in.

     Printing a painting doesn't take that work into the realm of the contemporary mythic by virtue of its technical innovation alone. This naïve supposition is reinforced in the wall labels for the show in statements like this fragment, referring to Guyton's engineered printing glitches, " this failure lends the work its formal and rhetorical power, offering an abstract picture of how machines, humans and images interact today."   One of these printed paintings, which approached a critical complexity lacking in most of the rest of the show, Untitled 2012, consists of a large, green - striped reproduction based on an enlargement of a book's endpapers. The decorative functionality of a book's endpapers, to contain and protect the actual, deeper contents of the book, its original text, seems a more creatively apt analogue for Guyton's overall approach to doing covers.

copyright  Tom McGlynn, Nov.8 , 2012

Ill Shod Feats and Over Soled Intentions: The Whitney Biennial 2012

by Tom McGlynn

Art and Language, Incident in a Museum ,1986

The most effective installation of work at the 2012 Biennial occurs in the “Untitled” Café in the basement of the museum. Directly above the dining area hangs a painting of a vacant floor in the Whitney by the British conceptual art group Art and Language. While not listed in the Biennial’s roster of primary participants, Art and Language have been invited to present an opera co-written by Red Crayola, the experimental art/ rock band, who are. The painting, a flat re-presentation of the institution’s somewhat dreary, emptied, halls, and in figurative contrast to the literal cultural recreation beneath it, is the clearest representation of this institutionally vacuous show. A similarly empty museum is reproduced on the Biennial’s event guide.

In her essay contribution to the exhibit, There’s No Place Like Home, Andrea Fraser does a good job at delineating how art institutions (and artists, viewers) can internalize and therefore extend the symbolic representation of art’s agency in a symmetrical loop of uninspired critiques.

“ It may well be the critical agency within our selves that plays the greatest role in maintaining this internal conflict and, thus, in reducing cultural critique to a defensive and reproductive function. By interpreting negations as critique, by responding to judgments of attribution with judgments of attribution, by aggressively attempting to expose conflicts and to strip away defenses in critiques of critiques and negations of negations, critical practices and discourses may often collude in the distancing of affect and the dissimulation of our immediate and active investments in our field.”

The curators, Elizabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders, state in the press release their conviction that the artists in the 2012 Biennial are “trying to cull into existence something real and true, pushing it up and out of layers of synthetic nothingness, idealism, cynicism” and that “such restless energy can be ecstatic, poetic, and tragic all at once in the tangled web of twenty-first-century American culture” This highly florid language, which should embarrass any sophisticated critique of contemporary art , is itself representational of the unbelievably lightweight interrogation of “the real” that pervades the show. By wading in the shallows of sociological and aesthetic theory to fish for its activated presence, the curators are left with a tale of the one that got away. The show presents like a thesis of a theory of embodied practice. The 2012 Biennial aggregates its form similar to a series of representational snap shots taken by a gifted tourist who projects how neat the slideshow will turn out, thereby impoverishing his/her actual experience of the there and was. Perhaps in anticipation of the possibility of the audience finding that staged re-presentation a bore, the curators have scheduled all manner of time- based and performative modes which might serve to leaven the pedantic nature of the scope and arrangement of physical works. It’s a smart move to “build in” real time when trying to “cull into existence something real and true”. I can’t faithfully include this dimension here since at this writing I have only seen a few screenings and a dance rehearsal, but I’ll hazard to guess that, if the choices of performances reflect anything like the guiding principles of the overall work on display, the tendency toward the theoretical real will play through. In a book I (literally) picked up on sidewalk as I left the museum, a 1953 edition of Feeling and Form, by Susanne K. Langer, I found this passage: “ But it is not the intervention of symbolism as such that balks our understanding of “lived” time; it is the unsuitable and consequently barren structure of the literal symbol”. A statement in a similar vein, included in the show from the idiosyncratic painter Forrest Bess, might be uncannily predictive of the representational malaise I sense enfeebling the exhibition, “Am I suffering from a disease of symbolism?”

Painting, 1949, Forrest Bess

In answer to this question we have a resounding affirmative from none other that that most hyperbolically mystifying filmmaker, Werner Herzog. He’s made a long career of heavy- handed symbolism, and puffed -up running commentary, verging on self- parody, in his film projects. Hercules Seghers is an interesting choice for Hertzog’s slide show tribute here since his work is the most symbolically folded and stylistically convoluted of the 16^th century Dutch landscape tradition. It is landscape as symbolic memory. Herzog typically finds extraordinarily resistant subjects to support his ridiculously ethereal reveries. Vincent Gallo is similarly a romantically self- absorbed auteur whose main claim to fame is in having directed the starlet Chloë Sevigny to give him a “real” blowjob in his barely plotted and insipidly unreal psycho- narrative film Brown Bunny. Including Hertzog and Gallo in the same show could be some kind of in-joke here, but more likely it’s the pathetic transference of a symbolic disease.

Why is this representational aspect of the Biennial so troubling? It is because the curators consistently telegraph their moves to invest symbolic meaning into the realm of “the real” without real effect. The obvious attention paid to the tokens of the real such as the strategic spatialization of many of the artist’s installations, the use of sound, the inclusion of time-based media and performance, don’t add up to a sum of embodied inspiration. Instead the ensemble feels like a feeble regression into some of the worst art clichés imaginable. Besides, any attempt to re-sublimate art with cogent meaning is doomed in this context. Herbert Marcuse, in his essay, The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness: Repressive De-Sublimation, points to the overriding cultural reality that tends to defeat such institutional gestures.

“Institutionalized de-sublimation thus appears to be an aspect of the “conquest of transcendence” achieved by the one-dimensional society. Just as this society tends to reduce, and even absorb opposition (the qualitative difference!) in the realm of politics and higher culture, so it does in the instinctual sphere. The result is the atrophy of the mental organs for grasping the contradictions and the alternatives and, in the one remaining dimension of technological rationality; the Happy Consciousness comes to prevail. It reflects the belief that the real is rational, and that the established system, in spite of everything. delivers the goods. The people are led to find in the productive apparatus the effective agent of thought and action to which their personal thought and action can and must be surrendered. And in this transfer, the apparatus also assumes the role of a moral agent. Conscience is absolved by reification, by the general necessity of things.”

What Sussman and Sanders have achieved in the 2012 Biennial is pretzel logic of sublimating “the real”, into the real, while de-sublimating the instinctual present. Without that instinctual dimension art no longer has any impact or import. By exteriorizing art’s “materiality” and rehearsing its “contingent practice” in a theoretical exegesis, the curators paradoxically deny the potential reality of art’s inherent becoming. Art’s immanence can be hotly (and is often shallowly) contested in the circular argument of the formal versus the social. In the 1993 Biennial, also curated by Sussman, the issue of the social interrogating the formal came to the fore. In that show however there were enough resistant characters among the artists to deny the limitations of the polemic. This is not the case with the present show. One of its few delegates for painting, Jutta Koether, is not only one of the most vapid painters in New York, but her installation of paintings, on sheets of glass, near a window, looks like a graduate student’s idea of the situational aesthetics of a classroom critique. Another painter, Andrew Masullo, represents as a practitioner of a sub-genre of art I’d call friendly formalism. His wall label states,

“ Masullo is known as a painter’s painter in part because, despite their ostensible simplicity and modest scale, his works deftly resist being confined by content or artistic movement”.

I’d differ with the fact that he is not part of a constituent movement. I can think of at least 20 painters off the top of my head, in New York alone, who are more or less friendly formalists. What’s interesting about this trend in painting is that it tends toward the de-sublimation of the traditional aura of abstraction while claiming its heritage as material grist for the mill. I found it curious also that Masullo is represented elsewhere in the exhibit in a few of the Forest Bess paintings that he owns. Perhaps possessing the aura of the eccentrically “real” symbolist lends Masullo an instinctual, atavistic charge that he nevertheless feels the need to neutralize in his own work.

Maybe this is also the meta-function of the Forrest Bess show- within- a- show in the Biennial. This tragically real sufferer from a symbolic disease (he was diagnosed schizophrenic) who mutilated himself in order to literally embody his theories of uniting the male and female spirit, seemed to misread creative sublimation as an obstacle rather than a natural defense to enable him to productively interrogate his reality. His desperate, symbolic struggle with his incapacity to reconcile his unresolved sexuality is poignantly documented in the show in statements such as: “If you remove the regeneration theory from my paper-there is nothing left but sexual perversion and that I couldn’t stomach” In Bess’s case he had the practice of abstract painting to act as a prosthetic sublimating device which probably lends his work it’s anxious power. But one might also consider how his attempts to achieve a physically regenerated self were handicapped by his unrealizable ideal of also attaining a visionary transparency. This literalized exteriorization of being seems symptomatic of the Biennial as well. You can’t stomach anything real if your guts are inside out.

Representing the anti-formal, or what the French writer and sub- cultural theorist Georges Bataille refers to as the transgressively uncategorizable “informe”, is Lutz Bacher. Her work has a pervasive presence in the show. A series of small, white -framed prints of celestial phenomena, apparently appropriated by Bacher from a scientific paperback, seem to be installed on almost every floor. Is this dispersal meant to be analogous to a poor reproduction of real universality in the Biennial proper, or is it elegiac of the scientific positivism of the past? The conceptual projection of these works is strained because their weakly disassociated logic reads too easily as artily obtuse. Her modified pipe organ has this same arch quality of offering just enough transgressive signification toward inappropriate usage of the traditional while failing to achieve a true negation of aesthetic pretense. If Bacher has no point to make, than she sure makes it unclearly.

Lutz Bacher, Pipe Organ (2010-11)

In fairness to many of the individual artists chosen to participate I should point out that the weakness of the overall curatorial vision does not always preclude individual poetic moments. Luther Price’s scarified and manipulated film scraps, often scored with the reductively harsh, yet hypnotic, soundtracks of sprocket holes running through the projector’s amplified audio, have an animated presence. His concept is not a new one, a trail blazed most famously by Stan Brackage and other visionary filmmakers, but his work provided much needed relief from the airless concept of the overall exhibition. The diminutive sculptures of Matt Hoyt offered a similarly refreshing pause. His work, often resembling drops of resin or gum wads, as well as more suggestive organic forms like branching coral or the inorganic remains of antique electronic components, claimed a smaller space of existence than much of the larger scale works in the show yet a larger share of embodied aura. Mike Kelley, who died last month, is represented in the show by a documentary film of his Mobile Homestead project, which took his unique ontological exploration of his cultural roots in Detroit on the road to various cities, situations and locales. It’s a shame that none of his actual sculptures are present in the show, since they may have offered an antic parody of the plodding pedantry prevalent in the physical show. He was a master at holding regressive sublimation in supreme tension with institutional desublimation.

The independent filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, who can honestly own a credible track record of stalking the imaginative possibilities of quotidian time and space in her films like Old Joy, and Wendy and Lucy, is an interesting addition to the roster of filmmakers included. George Kuchar is another filmmaker whose idiosyncratic body of work offers a lo- tech foil to the enervating academicism of this Biennial.

Dawn Kasper (detail from installation at 2012 Biennial)

In the end it is simply not possible to import the real into the context of the museum and have it read as undifferentiated naturalism. A young artist currently working in Detroit, Kate Levant, simply re-presents barely manipulated abject materials scavenged from derelict buildings. Hung in another installation that is reminiscent of a graduate critique, the residue of the real looks absurdly aestheticized here. A similar gesture by Dawn Kasper brings the entire contents of her transient studio existence into the museum, staging contingent reality as a performance piece. There is something profoundly insincere and socially irresponsible in isolating these gestures. The curators of the 2012 Biennial should have known better that simply representing the tokens of the real doesn’t recreate vision, and that vision is exactly what is needed to recreate the real.

Mike Kelley: Laughing at Deadlines

Mike Kelley:Laughing at Deadlines

Tom McGlynn

The first image I ever saw attributed to Mike Kelley, in the early 1980’s, was his appropriation of a well copied and circulated office joke in which a sequentially animated character bounces up and down with laughter with the punch line, “ You want it when?” At the time I thought it a canny choice for conflating art in the age of mechanical reproduction with an art world imperative to mindlessly crank out culture. Inside of this high take on low irony was an intimate identification with a working- class resistance to keeping up with abstract quotas. This resistant impulse could hold true for the office worker and the art worker alike.

Born in 1954 in a suburb of Detroit, Mike Kelley was a brilliant interlocutor for an erstwhile Middle America whose assembly line dreams lay re-possessed in second hand shops and recuperated in its teenagers’ impulsive subcultures. Across this wasted plain Kelley laughed up a tornado of demons that combined (in increasingly antic, recombinant scenarios) lapsed Catholic taste with existential philosophy, crackpot bricolage with the wreckage of Modernist theory, mental institution aesthetics (and ethics) with art institutional critique and adolescent desire with ritualized farce. He did so with an extraordinary sense of composition and color, not so much derived from abstract formal logic as much as it seemed scraped from the inside of his skull, a psychedelic byproduct of a particularly vivid, and periodically bad, trip.

Kelley moved to Los Angeles in 1979 to attend Cal Arts where he was no doubt influenced by the laid back conceptual art of some of the older artists he met there, like John Baldessari. It seems as if this deadpan approach to high concept suited him well since it is a thread that has run through the length of his career. In a 1985 Artforum article entitled “American Prayers” his longtime friend, and the bassist for Sonic Youth, Kim Gordon, mentions his knack for creating “ structuralist devices to make fun of the myth of rational thought which led to the myth of progress”. The imperative of Modernist determinism was yet another deadline to be laughed off. Of course there were other artists who took on this challenge in the mid-1980's like Richard Prince, Sherry Levine, and even to some extent Jeff Koons. While Koons offered a hard, stainless steel, reflective bunny (pedestrian pathos forged into commodity fetish) Kelley went soft, with collections of sewn, knitted and stuffed cuddle creatures gleaned from second hand shops and Salvation Army centers. Both artists understood the logic of pathological recuperation of sentiment and how this became hot content in an increasingly cold-shouldered world. Kelley, at the time, however, seemed to distain highly fabricated and polished artifacts, favoring instead the abject jetsam of what might be termed “surplus sentiment”, thereby not only recuperating empathic longing but also emphasizing the hand-crafted object over the mass produced, the impure and raggedy intention over the slick and obscure object of desire. This type of choice made evident his light- footed genius for being a formidable discussant in postmodern polemics, while simultaneously fashioning and throwing spitballs from the back of the lecture hall. His transgression wasn’t really one of arrested development, however (a common critique leveled at him by his detractors), so much as it was one of intentionally arresting and creatively analyzing the intentions of a culture that had gone seriously off the skids.

Remembering his mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum in 1993, “Catholic Tastes” I can recall the sense I had that Kelley, whose work I had experienced episodically in regular shows at Metro Pictures gallery in New York, had finally arrived at a point where his sociological slumming and philosophical auditing had reached a perfect balance of pathos and logic, of humane content and a serious study of its conceptual degradation. Although he was consistently and wickedly ironic, Kelley also seemed to manage a soft spot for societal screw-ups, both in the specific and universal sense. His project never became subject to the volatile insider- trading of postmodern theoretical stock, as many of his contemporaries’ work had. Prince and Koons seem long since vested by the dominant market to represent this particular co-opting of radical credibility. Sherry Levine’s 2011 retrospective at the Whitney embalmed any appropriation/transgression in institutional amber. Museums have become the (very expensive) second- hand shops of ruined cultural intentions. In contrast Mike Kelley was not only a clever recalcitrant but also an artist of highly refined intellect and intuition. By trolling marginalized subcultures (most often his own) for a tangential reading of failed intentions, Kelley’s work embodied, projected and almost predicted the most recently missed deadlines of so- called “serious” culture’s mandate for a new and improved future. John C. Welchman, in “The Mike Kelley’s in Mike Kelley” published by Phaidon in 1999 explains the artist’s modus operandi along these lines:

“Repression-production makes a Kelleyan pair with regression-movement, a helter-skelter of returns to anality, infantile object attachments, post-mirror-stage childhood and pre-sex adolescence. For Kelley such moves are not primitivizing, ‘escapist’ or nostalgic…. Instead he insists on tracking the implications of regression not ‘outside’, but ‘within the culture’, correlating them with an enquiry into social ‘failures’ and dysfunctionality; remembering that the act of going back, especially to the fuzzy moment of becoming adult, has an equivalent in the gesture of artistic making”

Kelley’s work, from about the mid -90’s up until his death in January 2012, along with the work of his friends and contemporaries, like Tony Oursler, Jim Shaw and Raymond Pettibon, became rapidly recognized, celebrated and assimilated in an overheated art market underwritten by newly distributed wealth at the top. The ultimate irony of the situation of his success and how it undermined his abject aesthetic had to have seriously troubled Kelley. His project was so intimately linked with shadowing the social failures of the same culture that had come to lionize him. Material success necessitated his setting up an extensive studio with assistants (an assembly line of sorts) to help fabricate his work. There was a sensual diminishment felt in his work, somewhere in the later 90’s when one became aware of how the delegation of fabrication in some of his installations left machined echoes of the whining router and busy drill press. While the installations became more ambitious and scaled –up, it seemed as if his crucial balance of weighty concept with flighty form had become somewhat compromised. This had to be a concern for an artist whose conceptual project was so intimately connected to its irresolute materiality. How does one continue to make impertinent, resistant art when its production moves from a do- it- yourself, creative recuperation of regressive psychological states into a mode of production that might just fit too well within the logic of late capitalism?

Kelley’s persona (of a manic auteur directing his own alter-egos) acts out quite vividly in his film and video works. These works seem conceived as an integral part of his tactics to keep his art aggressively reactive. Perhaps like Duchamp he had enough wit about him to anticipate his own radical artifacts’ shelf life. In these works he seemed focused on activating his special relationship to gross materiality and arch ritual, while pulverizing social protocol with manic individuation. These included works like “Day is Done” which has been both performed live and presented as an art/ video installation, first at the Gagosian gallery in 2005. This work is at times reminiscent of the lunatics’ theatrically taking over the asylum in Peter Brook’s 1967 film Marat/Sade, though in Kelley’s case the scenes are set in a dystopic high school assembly.

Kelley wonderfully spun his own asymmetrical eddy in the churning tides of art world tastes and popular culture. He may have recently felt hard pressed to creatively annotate and critique the implications of regression within contemporary culture when that culture increasingly does such an insane job of constantly relapsing into and recycling its own pathologies. That “fuzzy moment of becoming adult” seems to have become extended indefinitely. “You want it when?” has become “You can have it now!” but it will be forever incomplete. The punch line without the deadline is not as funny.

Timespotting: Damien Hirst’s Finite Jest : The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011 , opening at Gagosian galleries worldwide Jan 12, 2012

Timespotting: Damien Hirst’s Finite Jest. by Tom McGlynn

Damien Hirst : The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011 , opening at multiple Gagosian galleries worldwide January 12, 2012.

As much as I wouldn't like being an art “handler”, Damien Hirst’s multiple simultaneous arrivals at Gagosian galleries worldwide could do with some unpacking. As his “Spot” paintings sat on the gallery floor in Gagosian’s West 24^th St. location yesterday, ready for installation along with similar works in 10 other locales from London to Athens to Hong Kong, the phenomenological reality of Hirst’s grand gesture was brought home to me. In this as well as the other spaces, these large hand- made objects would be fixed in a specific time and place against the asymmetry of random experience. With his technical orchestration, Hirst minimalizes rational chance by maximalizing a kind of irrational uniformity. Like the form of the paintings, which are fixed symmetric grids of contrapuntal multicolored spots, a tension is felt between this controlled experiment and random life. His is a subverted Newtonian physics. The apple falls predictably straight down, dappled sun is sieved through a prism to reveal its constituent color wavelengths, but all of it happens in freeze frame.

“Anyone looking around for a simulated icon of the deity in Newtonian guise might well be disappointed” McLuan from The Medium is the Massage.

Was it Stalin who was purported to have made up exact replicas of the same room across Soviet Russia so that wherever he happened to be traveling a sameness of mis- en -scene was established? It’s not too difficult to figure out why a controlling despot would want to maintain the illusion of stopping time. But why does Hirst want to? I don’t think it’s a Dorian Gray scenario. Despite his grandiose artistic ambition I’ve never viewed Hirst as a strictly old school narcissist.

But getting back to the Age of Enlightenment, I’ve always seen Hirst’s projects as conceived under an empirical lens. The late 18^th and early 19^th century theatricality of his prior installations from the shark tank to the vitrines filled with vivisected bovines and clinical displays of pharmaceuticals smack of the curiosity cabinets and studies of learned amateurs. The casts of Enlightenment men were basically alchemists morphing into men of modern science, amateurs in the sense that we would see them in relation to the professional research class we presently maintain. In retrospect there’s a bit of an endearingly awkward, home- made quality to their experiments and models left behind. It is this pathos, of the innocence of old- fashioned empirical investigation, which imbues a lot of Hirst’s work .

With regards his place in contemporary art I would say Hirst is a reactionary against progressive Modernism in the sense that Picasso was also a reactionary against it. While Picasso may have wanted to re- enchant modern painting with a primitive animus by appropriating African artifacts from an anthropological museum, Hirst virtually loots the curious cabinets in studies and libraries of 18^th and 19^th century manor houses. Both artists have felt compelled to slow down, stop, or even reverse time in order to avoid the searching clinical light of what Baudelaire once referred to as the “gloomy beacon” of the New.

All of this is relevant to what I would call his present jest-ture of presenting a series of symmetrically conceived paintings in a simultaneous environment. In these shows Hirst’s latest conceptual cartwheel (remembering those notorious spin- art paintings) retains the model of the projection of empirical belief while capitulating to the failure of it promise.

That’s him, the professional amateur, in the spotlight, losing his religion.With Hirst's career you get the sense that he's just trying to keep up a competition that has already run its course. He represents a brand of the institutionally condoned avant-garde, which, by a strict definition of that word, isn’t transgressive at all. There was some poetry in his early work but this recent tactic is a mirroring of a desperate market. He's more of a professional apostate for a religion established by the money changers kicked out of the temple of high modernism. Hirst’s bad faith is augmented by some of the changing social realities of contemporary life and is probably the most interesting aspect of his work in general. The fearful symmetry of his Spot paintings installed in multiple locales worldwide is not the kind that illuminates the tangled network jungles of the post- modern night. Instead it creates a network overlay that functions as an amusing but purely technical representation, like the automata that delighted the pre- revolutionary courts of Europe. His punch card pathos slots too neatly into the crystalline structures of virtual social space that have come to dominate our current cultural and political reality. Our present- everyday- now is far from being physically possible but nevertheless makes claims upon our old- fashioned, empirical reason. In this wide world Hirst could be our most accurate representational artist.

Enter, stage left, a true post- modernist, Guy Debord of the Situationist International, who had some very timely advice of his own to offer, in his day, about cultural spectacle. Here he delineates the function of what he calls “the recuperator” which I think is an apt coda to this essay.

“ Time scares him because it is made up of qualitative leaps, irreversible choices and once in a lifetime opportunities. The (recuperator) disguises time to himself as a mere uniform space through which he will pick his way, going from one mistake to another, one failing to the next, growing richer.” Debord from The Real Split in the International.

Tom McGlynn copyright 2012